Play Protect
Play Protect allows artists and musicians to enforce digital rights management for their music using threshold encryption.
Project Description
Despite certain cultural trends and negative sentiments towards digital rights management, an artist's best ally for protecting the value of their work is encryption. Play Protect allows artists to truly own their intellectual property and grant streaming or download licenses to users that meet certain arbitrary, artist-defined conditions. Those conditions may be either on-chain or off-chain. Some examples include granting streaming licenses to fans who are followers of the artists on Lens protocol, or granting download licenses to fans who own a particular NFT issued by an artist.
Play Protect empowers artists to share and distribute their music in a decentralized and sovereign way. By harnessing the power of encryption, an artist's music can be published on public channels such as IPFS without exposing their creative works to piracy or otherwise diminishing the value of their work. Play Protect utilizes threshold encryption so that no single node or centralized entity holds the keys to decrypt artist content, thereby reducing chances of piracy and large-scale exploits.
In conclusion, despite some resistance towards digital rights management, encryption can be an effective tool for artists to protect the value of their work. Play Protect provides a decentralized and secure platform for artists to distribute their music while ensuring that their intellectual property remains safe from piracy and exploitation. Through the use of threshold encryption, Play Protect enables artists to control access to their content, granting licenses based on conditions set by the artist. This technology empowers artists to distribute their work in a more sovereign and independent way, reducing their reliance on centralized platforms and allowing them to maintain control over their creative output.
How it's Made
The project uses the following:
NextJS Lit Protocol SDK IPFS
An artist uses the UI to upload an mp3 to IPFS that is encrypted using Lit Protocol's SDK and underlying threshold encryption scheme. The artist defines conditions for media decryption and playback using Lit Protocol's access control conditions and Lit Actions. These conditions can use on-chain or off-chain resources from a near infinite array of sources including dozens of blockchains and any API available behind HTTP.
When a fan wants to play media, they simply sign a message to authenticate their address and assuming access control conditions are met, the Lit Protocol nodes will return the requisite number of BLS shares in order to form the encryption key to decrypt the media. The media is then finally retrieved and decrypted client-side allowing the fan to play the artist's work.
